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welcome to the zulily engineering blog!

It has been just over four and a half years now since Darrell and Mark (our two co-founders) came up with the original idea for zulily. And from the beginning we’ve focused on building software to power a new way of shopping online. We call it discovery-based shopping.

Here at zulily our tech team is at the core of the business and involved in the entire life-cycle of both our vendors and our customers. Whether it’s building internal tools for our merchandizing and studio teams, launching new features on our vendor portal or vendor data exchange or delivering a new personalized experience on our mobile or site experience, we are always focused on challenging ourselves to build world-class solutions which exceed expectations.

We are a build shop and big supporters of the open source community. We believe in the power of the community and feel we have an obligation to give back to the projects that have helped us get to where we are today. As we continue our transition from small, frenetic start-up, expect to see us continue to be more active in the community.

At our core we have 10 values we try to live by on a daily basis. These have served us well over the past 4+ years as we’ve tried new things and experienced major wins… and a number of “well, that was a bad idea” moments.

“No” is not in our vocabulary — we strive to find creative solutions and the path to “yeah, we’ll give it a go”.

We believe in speed of innovation and taking agile development to the extreme.

We embrace a customer-centric view to delivering technology solutions — always start with the customer.

Mistakes are expected and encouraged — we learn from them and move on.

We empower our engineers to solve business problems and tailor our process accordingly.

Engineers write production code and own it from start to finish.

We are defensive in nature: we assume things will break and plan for it.

We believe in “just-in-time” software with an eye towards capacity and scalability.

We value full transparency and continuous communication.

We strive to find the simple solution in anything we do.

In the end we’re all about building an amazing team, passionate about building awesome software and technology solutions. We love to move fast and take risks. And we’re big believers in the idea of continuous improvement.

Thanks for taking a few minutes out of your busy day to read our tech blog. We hope you enjoy it!